In honour of the Fire Festival (and inspired by Kamelia) I’ve been playing around with the various outfits worn by my most commonly played characters. Each one is wearing one piece of Fire Festival specific clothing either from the set or the tabards you get from slaying Ahune.

Spurred on by the thought of the Mage Class Hall and the realization that everyone else seems to have multiple 100s, I made a final push to get another character to level 100 yesterday. With a bit of prior preparation, she went from level 93 to mid way through 99 in less than 15 minutes. Those Elixirs of the Rapid Mind are without doubt my new favourite thing about WoD.

Merrymaker Merrily, cat “owner”, Fire Mage and Pyromancer (mostly the flames indicate death by fire) is now albeit temporarily at the level cap.

She’s wearing the following:

Manaweave Robe: The reward from an old Mage quest, now removed from the Game. No idea which of my various Mages I completed the quest on.

First up, I’m “Fabulous”. Who knew I was hoarding that many items of clothing. With the exception of my Shaman, everyone else is hiding shoulders and is likely to be doing so for the foreseeable future. I’ve also found so many things I didn’t know I had like the scythe off Ahune and the Blessed Leggings of Undead Slaying.

The changes to the Toybox have given me lots more bag spaces as well as the Robo-Gnomebulator.

Gnome Hunters…every baby Gnome I encountered at the start zone had a mechanical Bunny in tow.

Snow has decided to go back to her roots. The achievement for Benediction has made her very happy, even to the point that she let Sprout transmogrify Anathema.

Playing a Holy Priest today though felt a lot less fun than yesterday. Now part of that is definitely the content I’ve been doing, we did heroic UBRS as a Protection Warrior/Holy Priest duo and then did a couple of the Pandaria raids with the same combination. Mana really wasn’t really an issue even when someone pulled all the first packs of UBRS at once (glares in Warrior’s direction) so I had the talent which lets your single target heals refresh renew. That meant for virtually all of it, I had to cast renew once per fight, then flash heals interlaced with smite spam, holy fire off cooldown and loot.

No inept Shadowfiend, no mind sear, no shadow word pain, no power word shield, no fear and no mind vision. I didn’t think I’d miss them but I do. Obviously raid/pvp healing will need more than those 3 spells to sustain a fight but I liked having a tool box bursting at the seams with spells.

The removal of Basil the inept Shadowfiend probably hurts the most. Not because he was needed for damage or mana but because I have fond memories of his ineptness during raids. In an ideal world, we’d get a cosmetic glyph which lets Holy Priests summon an “inept shadowfiend” which would bounce around being useless for 10 seconds on a minute cooldown.

On the plus side, getting Mind Control back gave me a big smile. I never felt I could justify the talent point on something so specific but it’s fun for duoing five mans at the appropriate level and it’s a great source of amusement in PvP.

Finally no more gold missions at the Garrison makes me very happy, okay it essentially paid for my mobile Transmogrification Yak but feeling I’ve escaped them even if it’s temporarily is a wonderful feeling.

Knowing the Patch is going to come and knowing exactly when the patch is coming have turned out to be two entirely different things, at least in the Harpy Household.

My plan for Wednesday morning has entirely centered around transmogrification and the long awaited Wardrobe feature. Can I imagine using “the Fabulous” title on any of my characters…absolutely not but from the little Beta testing I’ve done, the ability to hide shoulders along with cloak and helm makes me very happy. Especially because I love some of the older cloth robes and they just don’t have shoulders which match perfectly.

In fact my only bugbear is the way they’ve changed the mechanics behind the “hide” feature. Having to return to a Transmogrification NPC whenever you secure a new piece of equipment is for want of a better word annoying. I know in the grand scheme of the game, it’s a very minor problem and one that perhaps 75 percent of the player base won’t even see as an issue but it grates for me.

So I finally gave in and purchased this:

It’s probably an accurate representation of the luggage I take for even the smallest trips too.

I’ve exchanged all my garrison resources for gold, I’ve mailed out all the bind on equip gear which my bank alts have been hoarding since the Wardrobe system was first mentioned and I’ve taken farewell pictures of Snow’s Chakras (I know I hated them, hated the giant “I’m a holy Priest come and try and kill me” targets on you in PvP, hated the noise they make whenever you switch but I’ll still miss them).

Technically I’m ready for the dawning of a brand new age but despite the fact that I didn’t enjoy Draenor, I can’t escape that tinge of sadness.

I’m in a funny place with WoW at the moment. I want to play, in fact I even have a mini list in my head of things I want to do but when I log in I find myself randomly staring into space and doing nothing at all. Today for example I logged my Monk and went Timeless Isle. Once there, I rode around aimlessly for a bit, had a go at killing something and discovered I’d completely forgotten my keybinds. Smarting slightly from my narrow escape, I logged my Priest and attempted to do some archaeology. This to be fair, was marginally more successful but now I’m in the “interesting” position of making rares on almost every type and they take too long for my current WoW attention span.

I want to level a Warlock to 90 but questing feels stale.

I want more achievement points

I want to become exalted with 60 reputations on Snowflower.

I want to make a Horde character now that our server has been merged and level it to 90 in preparation for the expansion.

I want to make more gold because I never enter expansions with enough

These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things I want to achieve when it comes WoW and yet I just can’t find the enthusiasm to push myself forward. In some ways I feel I’ve spoilt the current game for myself by dabbling away in the Beta.

So rather than sink into self pity, I decided that what I needed was transmogrification to cheer me up.

I’ve tried to pick items that require dungeon runs or quest chains that Snowflower hasn’t completed yet like the Chillwind chain in the Plaguelands and of course the Polychromatic Visionwrap since UBRS is being revamped in the expansion. The plan therefore is to attempt to farm these or similar items over the next fortnight and hope at the same time that this re-wakes my enjoyment in the game.

My Nightelf is perhaps a tad too square jawed but I can live with that. I haven’t tried healing but am currently beating Orcs up on a 90 Druid and am heartily enjoying the experience. Would I want to do it 20 times, probably not but so far it’s been interesting and I’ve met some fascinating people along the way.

I rather like the fact that the women did the fighting for once and having a Warden along for the ride… well that’s pretty awesome.

Also blood drinking Toucans are a wonderful touch and everything I’ve seen so far is extremely pretty if slightly gruesome.

In fact I think Shadowmoon Valley mark 2 might easily become one of my favourite zones in game.

The potential for transmogrification also seems interesting as my new character received this very quickly:

Yep, a staff with a cluster of adorable little bugs flying around it’s end.

Given the beautiful azure blue of the sky today mirrored off the sea, this poem seemed so perfectly appropriate to introduce this month’s entry.

I have a love hate relationship with the Glacial robes. Love in that they are beautiful, elegant and oh so delicate looking but hate the fact that there aren’t any shoulders which match perfectly. Vestia’s Pauldrons of Inner Grace is another item that I’ve always been partial too and so having given the matter some thought and indeed tried multiple other options, I thought “why not….”.